ENGLISH VERSION

Silence exists only in dead places like the depths of the desert, the bottom of the abyss, the sidereal space, the acoustical asepsis of soundproofed rooms, or in the grave. It was said in the Sixties that the sound of silence is that of incommunicability and isolation, which “like a cancer grows”. In fact, nothing essential happens in the absence of noise. From the very beginning, universe generates itself with the supreme noise of the Big Bang. We are all born surrounded by screams. Revolutions blast out, as the unstoppable entropy of all things.

Noise has also a powerful political value, because “a network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them.”

In the mare magnum of musical knowledge, less and less elitist and more and more accessible, Sil Bia’s documentary has the worth of identifying a topic that flies down the radar of information (excluding of course the radars of authorized freak personnel). The word breakcore was first used in 1992, to describe hardcore music in 4/4 with the addition of disrupted rhythmic schemes, made with the purpose of “pushing further the boundaries of the techno genre” because “the star system is replicated even in very small sub-scenes and subcultures.”

An immensely chaotic, disturbing musical genre was born: a continuous sound of acid rain, of analogical storm, which can remind of the sound “of a granny breaking herhips” or “ofwolves howling at the sky in an icy winter”. Breakcore stands out with a total absence of aesthetic charms that could attract the cultural industry. No business can be built on noise.

Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise is characterized by blurred images, with dirty and disturbed grain, which rhythmically espouse the arhythmical chaos of breakcore music. There is a homology between the subject matter and the style chosen to represent it. The visual interferences are created with a Noise Maker, made by integrated circuits, the same used by the veteran blast-maker Sans Culottes to create her visual sets of flying fishes, voodoo vévés, dizzying flights through architectures of abandoned factories, sabbatical goats, molecules, fake Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, equations, guinea pigs, television skies.

The scenario in which we move is the one of the great kingdoms of noise of contemporary metropolis. The musical label Praxis Records has its headquarters in Berlin. It is an extremely conceptual project, whose purpose is “the application of ideas in reality”. The noise is practiced like a guerrilla act, as a “disturbance of the normalcy “. In the Nineties, the ordinary administration for Praxis people was to have Marx for breakfast, Guy Debord for lunch and Baudrillard for dinner. After lunch, they used to write an article for the Datacide fanzine. After dinner, they organized an illegal rave party. After the rave party, they transfixed a rosary of noise, which would be pressed on a record without label. All the records of Praxis are devoid of any kind of information; there are “obviously” no writings on them, following a communication strategy which comes from the White Labels in the dawning of house and techno music. At the beginning all the DJs of Praxis records were called DJ Jackal, it was a multiple name like Luther Blissett. Because “visibility is a trap”. To escape from the imperative of visibility seems to be the only way to perform actions of resistance, like in the case of Anonymous. Breakcore was born with the first techno scene, which attempted to remain invisible even to the media eye. There was not collaboration with the media, to avoid the long reach of the cultural industry. It is not by chance that “praxis” means “doing”. Doing things, doing things that can’t be exploited to produce the umpteenth, useless, devalued pecuniary wealth.

Among sizzlings of white noise, litanies from TheSociety of the Spectacle, cultural paradoxes, interviews to the founding members of the label and planar flights through urban psychogeographies, Nothing Essential Happens In The Absence of Noise provides documentary evidences of revolutionary methodologies which seem, twenty-five years after their formulation, actual more than ever.